Transcript British blue notes and backbeats ─ musicological missing

British blue notes and backbeats
─ musicological missing links ─
Philip Tagg
Faculté de musique, Université de Montréal
(November 2004)
An example of how musicology can
contribute to the defalsification of
canonic consensus in the history of
North American popular music
3 main points of origin
The problem
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Identification of the ‘corporeal’ with African music
Identification of the ‘cerebral’ with European music
Identification of pitches outside the twelve-note
tempered scale as foreign (to ‘us’), ergo African
Identification of pitches within the twelve-note
tempered scale as European
Identification of rhythmic complexity and of
improvisation as African
Identification of rhythmic simplicity and lack of
improvisation as European
Presentation overview
1. General patterns of migration/deportation
• West African
• British
2. Musicological zoom-in
• British blue notes
• British backbeats and cross-rhythm
• Melismatic ornamentation
3. Conclusions and consequences
Deporting Africans (1)
Map source - http://www.ev-stift-gymn.guetersloh.de/uforum/black_history/slavery/triangle_trade.html [040506]
Deporting Africans (2)
1666-1776: Slaves imported only by the
English for the English, French and
Spanish colonies: 3 million (250,000
died on the trip)
1776-1800: A yearly average of
74,000 slaves were imported for the
American colonies with a total of
1,850,000
http://www.homestead.com/wysinger/mapofafricadiaspora2.html
USA: some C19 immigrant demographics
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1800: US popul. 5.3 mill: 80% British, 10% African, 10% other
1810: US population 7.3 million
1816: Postwar crisis in Britain causes mass emigration
1820: German immigration increases until 1850
1826: James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans
1840-90: >50% of US immigrants (total popul. 17 mill./50 mill.)
arrive from Great Britain or Ireland
1846: Potato famine in Ireland (population from 8 to 2 mill.)
1865: US civil war ends: slavery officially abolished
1890: US popul. 50 mill: >50% of immigrants Slavonic or
Mediterranean
1898: HMV & DGG start mass production of recordings
Early British immigration to USA
C17: 2 types of immigration
• c. 30% skilled and quite prosperous to New England
• c. 70% poor, young, single men to the Chesapeake
C18: after Union of England and Scotland
(1707) and after defeat of Jacobite
rebellion (1745) more Scots than English
Brits in New World c.1800: summary
US popul. 5.3 mill., Brits 4.3 mill. (80%)
1.
2.
New England Brits: arrived in C17 and early C18: quite prosperous
Virginia Brits: arrived throughout C17 and C18: mostly poor
•
from England and Wales before industrial revolution mid C18
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from rural Britain, increasingly from Scotland, during C18
Musically ─ most emigrated without having heard:
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Handel (British monarchy’s official composer)
Brass bands, symphony orchestras and other official music
Accordeon, piano and other equal-toned instruments
Recorded or broadcast music
Musically ─ most emigrated having heard:
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Rural popular singing and dance music (‘folk music’)
Simply harmonised hymns (e.g. Scots’ Psalter, 1564; Wesley’s Psalms &
Hymns, 1737)
Fife and drum bands (military recruitment, etc.)
Archaic Englishness in Appalachia
“This last week I took down three ballads
given in Child* which I have never before
heard sung and to which there are no
published tunes… The first of these is one of
the oldest ballads known, and is the
prototype of Lord Rendal, a very rare and
valuable find… [T]his field is a far more
fertile one upon which to collect English folk
songs than England.” (Cecil Sharp’s Diary for 27
August, 1916, in Hot Springs, Kentucky)
“Taking all reservations into account, I still
believe that the biggest danger lies in
underestimating the isolation of their lives,
the lack of canned music, the scarcity of
professional musicians, the grip of tradition.”
(Peter van der Merwe: Origins of the Popular Style, p.45;
Oxford University Press, 1999)
*Francis J. Child: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 vols., London, 1882-1898)
British ‘blue’ notes - examples
1. Weaving song from The Hebrides (1930s)
Blue’ notes (3rds) at 8, 13 and 17”, then pasted consecutively
2. The Lost Soul (Doc Watson Family, Kentucky, c. 1960)
Listen for the woman singing at the highlighted words…
What an awful day when the judgement comes
And the sinners hear their eternal doom! (their eternal doom!)
At the sad decree (at the sad decree) they’ll depart for ay (x2)
Into endless woe (into endless woe), endless woe and gloom.
3. Darling Corey
(Doc Watson, Kentucky, c. 1960)
Banjo and fiddle in straight D major (with f#).
Listen for vocal line’s ‘blue’ notes (f8) at the highlighted words…
Wake up, wake up, Darling Corey, what makes you sleep so sound?
Them highway robbers are a-coming, they’re a-ringing around your town.
European (incl. British) backbeats
(the TAC in BOOM-TAC BOOM-TAC)
The emphatic backbeat, conventionlally held by rock historians to be an
African-American trait, is just as common in music of British and
Central European origin.*
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Johan Strauss (I): polka c. 1840
(recording not yet available)
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Band of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (fife and drum section): God Bless
the Prince of Wales (Trad., rec. c.1990)
*Garry Tamlyn: The Big Beat: Origins and development of snare backbeat and other
accompanimental rhythms in Rock 'n' Roll. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool, 1998.
British cross rhythm: Scotch snaps
Pattern of 2 syllables/notes of which the first is short and accentuated,
the second unaccentuated, in British, especially Scottish, English, as in
‘do it’, ‘get it’, ‘matter’, ‘pretty’, ‘Annie’, ‘Peter’, ‘Philip’, ‘David’, ‘Scottish’,
etc., i.e. an inverted dotting (= | e q . |, not | q . e |).
1. Strathspey (Trad. Scottish., Farquhar McRae, fiddle; rec. c.1960).
Numerous snaps and straight dottings throughout: impossible to tell
position of downbeat until end of first 8-bar period.
2. Sally Good’n (Trad. Appalachian, Fiddlin’ Eck Robertson, rec. 1926).
Snaps at end of each phrase (‘Sally Good’n’, ‘wouldn’t’, ‘couldn’t’, etc.)
3. Randall Collins (Trad. Appalachian, Norman Blake, rec. 1972).
Fifteen dollars is my game, fifteen is my draw,
Randall Collins, it is my name in the state of Arkansas.
Guitar solo: SNAP SNAP SNAP SNAP SNAP SNAP — plus …
•“Fifteen” (1st time) anticipates downbeat (syncopation)
•“Randall Collins, it is my name” sung in 6/8 time against 4/4 (cross rhythm)
— and with ‘blue’ note —
British cross rhythms (2)
Hemiola:
u iiq iiq
or 3x2 || H
iq iq iq
6 notes grouped 2x3
||
The hemiola is the most simple polymetric device in West Africa.
Common in Hispanic popular music (e.g. cueca, son jalisco), it was also
a feature of the Galiard (C16-C17 in England). The two rhythmic
groupings can occur at the same time or in succession.
John Dowland: Earle of Essex’ Galiard (1600)*
*
a.k.a song Can she excuse her wrongs with virtue’s cloak?
British melismas
Melismatic singing: several notes to same syllable; opposite of syllabic
singing (= 1 note per syllable).
Improvising florid pentatonic melismas is common in gospel music and
conventionally regarded as a typically African(-American) practice.
Hebridean home worship (in Gaelic, rec. c.1960)
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Lead singer (precentor) melismatically embellishes basic hymn
melody.
Other singers follow her lead, each producing different but related
melodic lines at the same time (heterophony).
Individual’s relationship to God essential in radical Protestantism,
therefore varying improvised interpretations of same melody.
Amazing Grace (rec. Kentucky 1950s)
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Lead singer (precentor) summarises each line of hymn in advance
for illiterate congregation who follow with complete phrase.
Melismatic (and pentatonic) embellishment — ‘snaking the voice’ —
by all (no heterophony).
Personal relationship to God essential in radical Protestantism (and
in U.S. Constitution), therefore embellished melody.
Conclusions
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The majority of C17 and C18 British immigrants to the USA were poor and
from rural areas.
They left Britain before the industrial revolution.
They settled in the Virginias, the Scots, who emigrated in the mid-to-late
C18, mostly in the hinterland of the southern Appalachians.
For at least 150 years they lived in relative isolation from urban cultures.
They were unlikely to have been exposed to much music of Central
European origin but did come into contact with the music of slaves
deported from West Africa.
The music of poor rural Brits shared more traits in common with the music
of the slave population than with the Central Europeans who sometimes
confused ‘Scotch’ and ‘nigger’ melodies (‘blue’ notes, snaps, cross-rhythmic
devices, melismas, etc.).
Acculturation between British and African traditions is at the basis of the
second wave* of globally diffused North American popular music (from
1940s, especially after 1955 — R&B, country, rock, etc.).
*First wave: Central European and jazz-influenced popular musics, 1890-1960.
Ideological and epistemological consequences - 1
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Conventional discourses about N. American popular music
characterise cultural traditions (incl. musical) according to
hegemonic categories institutionalised during the slave trade
which provided the economic basis for the foundation of the USA.
By so doing, these conventional discourses exaggerate racial
difference at the expense of social and cultural similarity.
The consequent confusion of racial with cultural traits leads to the
identification of false ‘others’, characterisable in either derogatory
(racist) or ostensibly positive terms (inverted racism).
Positing false ‘otherness’ impedes identification of ‘otherness’ in
terms of oppression and alienation in the context of the
hegemonic ‘home’ culture (divide et impera).
Rationalism, hijacked by capitalism since C18, was not applied
systematically to ‘irrational’ aspects of human organisation
(theories of society, the individual, emotions, body, gender, etc.)
until C20. We still have to create alternative discourses to deal
with the sociocultural realities of shared subjectivities.
Ideological and epistemological consequences - 2
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Music studies have suffered particularly severely from the
effects of irrational ‘rationalism’. Conventional music studies,
by focusing on certain formal aspects of just one among
thousands of music cultures, have tended to mystify rather
than explain how music relates to the rest of human life.
Many academics have therefore been unable to understand
how music creates culturally specific ways of representing
patterns of emotion, gesture, corporeality, social interaction
and attitudes, etc.
Academic studies in the West still revolve around printing
technologies which evolved between C15 and C19. They
consequently tend towards the logocentric or scopocentric,
neglecting symbolic systems which use movement, tactility
and non-verbal sound as materials in the production and
dissemination of values and meaning.
Ideological and epistemological consequences - 3
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Scholars outside musicology need to discuss musical
meaning if they want to explain central aspects of the
culture/society they are investigating.*
Musicologists need to develop ways of helping nonmusicologists to deal with music as if it meant
something.
Musicologists and non-musicologists should work
together to develop these tools.
* “If you want to know whether a people is well governed and whether their laws are
good or bad, examine the music they make.“ (Confucius/Kongfuzi, 551-479 B.C.)
Verbal references
African diaspora
http://www.homestead.com/wysinger/mapofafricadiaspora2.html
Hamm, Charles (1979): Yesterdays. Popular Song in America; New York: Norton
Merwe, Peter van der (1989): Origins of the Popular Style; OUP
Slave trade (Evangelishe Stift, Gütersloh, Germany)
http://www.ev-stift-gymn.guetersloh.de/uforum/black_history/slavery/triangle_trade.htm
Slave Trade (Port Cities: Liverpool, UK)
http://www.mersey-gateway.org/server.php?show=nav.00100c
Slave trade today (BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3589646.stm
Tagg, Philip (1989): "Open Letter about 'Black Music', 'Afro-American Music' and
'European Music'"; Popular Music, 8/3: 285-298.
— Background dates to the history of English-language popular music [041110]
http://www.tagg.org/udem/histanglo/yearpmushist.pdf
— Histoire de la musique populaire anglophone (MUL1121) [041110]
http://www.tagg.org/udem/histanglo/histanglo.htm
— Popular Music Studies: a brief introduction [041110]
Musical references
Amazing Grace (mel. US Trad., printed in Virginia Harmony, 1831)
The Folk Box; Elektra/Folkways Elektra EKL-9001 (1964).
The Band and Drums 1st Battalion of the The Royal Welch Fusiliers:
God Bless The Prince Of Wales (Trad., n.d.)
The Band and Drums 1st Battalion of the The Royal Welch Fusiliers. RS/1 (c.1990)
Blake, Norman: Randall Collins (US Trad.)
Home In Sulphur Springs. Rounder 0012 (1972).
Dowland, John: Earle of Essex Galliard (c. 1610)
The Elizabethan Collection. Boots Classical Collection DDD 143 (1988)
Hebridean Weaving Song & Hebridean Home Worship (Scottish Trad.)
Musique Celtique Îles Hebrides (ed. T Knudsen). International Folk Music Council:
Anthologie de la musique populaire, OCORA OCR 45 (1970).
McRae, Farquhar (fiddle): Strathspey (Scottish Trad.); unidentified recording c.1960
Robertson, "Fiddlin'" Eck: Sally Goodin (US Trad., rec 1926)
Southern Dance Music, Vol. 2, Old-Timey LP 101 (1965).
Watson, Doc: Darling Corey (US Trad.)
The Doc Watson Family. Smithsonian Folkways SF 40012 (1990).
Watson, Doc & "Family": The Lost Soul (US Trad.)
Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley: The Original Folkways Recordings 1960-1962.
Smithsonian Folkways SF40029/30 (1994).